A Lost G.O.P. Field Struggles to Debate Without Trump

As Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate progressed, it became clear that Donald Trump had pulled the rest of the G.O.P. candidates into his gravitational well, locking them into near-permanent orbit around his personality. Without Trump, who boycotted the Fox News event over a disagreement with one of its hosts, the rest of the candidates seemed confused at how to define themselves on their own terms, or to confront each other without the front-runner present.

After months of debates in which every candidate was forced to reckon with Trump’s presence—from his constant barrage of insults to his increasingly extremist positions—only Cruz was left as a serious contender against Trump by the last debate, while the rest of the candidates were reduced to attacking each other in the few minutes they were able to steal away from the billionaire businessman.

But it quickly emerged Thursday that several candidates—Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz in particular—had no narrative of their own, and instead of pushing the final argument for their candidacy in the days before the Iowa caucuses, offered voters only rough drafts of their presidencies.

Chris Christie and Kasich revealed unclear foreign policies, with Kasich citing an unknown diplomat as the rationale for his European policy, and Christie hedging on his plan to defeat ISIS. Neurosurgeon Ben Carson, not quite known for comprehensive policy to begin with, resorted to reciting the entire preamble of the Constitution as his closing statement.

Jeb Bush, the candidates most often shoved into a psychological locker by Trump, attempted to emerge from Trump’s shadow to establish himself as an experienced, bilingual former governor of Florida, but caved from the get-go by awkwardly admitting that he came from a political dynasty. “I guess I’m part of the establishment,” he shrugged, confirming the criticism that Trump hurled at him for six debates.

Nowhere was this more evident than in Megyn Kelly’s ruthless questioning, utterly devastating Rubio and Cruz with pointed video clips of them flip-flopping on positions like amnesty and legalization of undocumented immigrants. Cruz and Rubio likely anticipated those attacks from each other (and probably hoped that the drama of their televised clash would differentiate each other), but had no idea how to communicate a clear, unique answer to questioning from a third party.

Occasionally, it even felt like the candidates were climbing over each other to reclaim six debates’ worth of airtime, ignoring the set rules and interrupting the moderators during questions posed to someone else. “Gosh, if you guys ask one more mean question, I may have to leave the stage,” Cruz threatened moderator Chris Wallace at one point in a Trumpian power move. (Wallace, to his credit, refused to let Cruz bulldoze him during a thirty-second exchange.)

In a normal cycle, candidates could hone those positions on-air in front of millions of people, learning what the electorate responds to best, and how to forge their own narrative. But in this cycle, the majority of candidates have been forced to spend each debate attacking Trump’s temperament and lack of leadership, slow to realize that his positions resonated the most with the country. By attempting to define themselves along the axis of his personality—in other words, in Trump’s terms—it seemed as if the candidates, over time, had forgotten how to be themselves.

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